To improvise is to make it up as you go along, to make do with whatever happens to be available, to proceed without a plan. Like a jazz musician, you compose and create simultaneously. When you improvise, you create in the moment, responding intuitively to the environment and your inner feelings. You let go. By letting go of your assumptions and biases, you open a path to new ideas, new practices, and new behaviors. You consciously forget what you know in order to elicit spontaneity, serendipity, and surprise.
Improvisation is a way of thinking with your body. In role play, you take on the role of a character, imagine a situation, and act as you think your character would act in that situation. Putting yourself in another person's shoes helps you to empathize with that person's goals and challenges, and can lead to insights and better solutions.
Bodystorming (see game description in Chapter 4) is a kind of improvisation in which players construct (sketch) a makeshift world using cardboard, chairs, or whatever is at hand, and then act out scenarios within that world in order to understand it better.
In the early 1990s, user experience designer Jared Spool and several colleagues developed a design game in which players worked together to design a prototype of an interactive kiosk using cardboard and paper. The purpose of the game was to help designers learn how paper prototyping could speed up their design process.
Because of the fleeting, impermanent nature of the ideas generated by these kinds of exercises, it can be very helpful to have some recording equipment handy, such as a video camera, a small tripod, and perhaps a microphone. If you plan to be doing a lot of this you may want to invest in more professional equipment. There's a balance to be struck here: while recording sessions is a way to create tangible artifacts that represent temporal experiences, it may also take some of the spontaneity out of the improvisation. You can read more about improvisation in Chapter 3.